All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart – Siddharth Dasgupta

Description

In this his third collection of poetry, writer Siddharth Dasgupta goes about gathering addresses and intimacies. All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart is an opera of the streets and their fluctuating enigmas. Variously, the collection dances into photographic memory, the pull of desire, and the cherished bouquets of home. You’ll encounter Shashi Kapoor, Brigitte Bardot, and Nina Simone. You’ll unravel the golden shovel, birthed from words by Carver, Proust, Seth, and such. You’ll swim in the slipstream of rebellious ghazal arrangements. And in the end, perhaps you’ll be reminded of your own streets—those places where joy was rife and where, concurrently, sadness lingered like a misplaced Sufi.

“Siddharth Dasgupta’s All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart is a shimmering, accomplished collection of poems that weaves in and out of cityscapes, the worlds of jazz, blues, and the movies, segueing from taut emotion to pensive reflection to playful self-irony. These poems are rich in the kind of detail that only an awareness of plural pasts and multiple presents can impart: the landmarks of a neighbourhood, tenderly enumerated like sacred names in a chant.” — Ranjit Hoskote, award-winning poet, cultural commentator, curator, and author of the upcoming Icelight

“Siddharth’s poems do what I enjoy most about poetry—render the normal, the everyday, the quotidian, strange and unfamiliar, helping us see them in a new light. How god can be found in a bakery, for example, or how “maybe the best days are an abandonment of the special.” We are invited to wander through these lines, and are startled always by a new way of seeing, by a detail, by a line, or many, that remain.”— Janice Pariat, celebrated novelist, poet, and author of the upcoming Everything the Light Touches